Rwanda 20 years on: the tragic testimony of the children of rape
The Guardian - 20 minutes ago
Lindsey Hilsum
The Observer, Saturday 7 June 2014 14.46 EDT
Rwanda 20 years on: the tragic testimony of the children of rape
Two decades after the 1994 genocide, a television journalist returns
to hear the extraordinary testimony of women who were raped during the
violence - and of the children born as a result
Olivier Utabazi, 19, and his mother, Epiphane Mukamakombe, 44, outside
their home in Kibilizi. The son of rape, he is her only close
surviving relative, after her family were killed in the genocide.
Photograph: Stephen Hird / Channel 4 News/.
When Josiane Nizomfura was 12, she wanted to get a glimpse of her
father, so she sneaked out of school and went to the public trial
where her mother was testifying against him for rape.
Levine Mukasakufu had never told Josiane the circumstances of her
birth. "I couldn't face it, so she found out from the neighbours," she
said. Levine - a tiny, delicate woman like a brightly coloured bird in
her traditional wrap skirt - is one of the half a million women raped
during
Rwanda's 1994 genocide, when the country's ethnic Hutus, under orders
from their leaders, tried to wipe out the minority Tutsis.
Then aged 21, Levine and other young women in Kibilizi, 80 miles south
of the capital, Kigali, were forced to assemble on the village playing
field. The Interahamwe, the Hutu militia that spearheaded the
massacres of Tutsis, picked those they wanted, forcing them into the
surrounding banana and millet patches to be gang-raped. "Rape was a
reward the leaders gave those who killed," said Levine. "This is why I
didn't love my daughter - her father was the one who killed my family.
I wanted to kill her, too."
When Levine discovered that her daughter had watched her testify, she
beat her all night long. It was one of many assaults. After failing to
abort the baby, she frequently lashed out at Josiane when she was a
child. "If she misbehaved at all I would say, 'she's like her father,
she's an Interahamwe'. I would chase her away saying, 'this is a Tutsi
house, and you don't belong here'," she said.
This week's Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in Conflict, hosted
by the British foreign secretary, William Hague, and actress Angelina
Jolie, aims to put victims such as Levine and Josiane at the centre of
war crimes investigations. Governments are expected to sign a new
protocol for documenting wartime sexual assaults and adopt programmes
to educate their soldiers that rape is a war crime rather than an
inevitable consequence of conflict.
Although rape occurs in all wars, it was especially widespread in
Rwanda, and the consequences are felt to this day. The International
Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda concluded that rape was an integral part
of genocide. "Sexual violence was a step in the process of destruction
of the Tutsi group ... destruction of the spirit, of the will to live,
and of life itself," said the verdict on the Hutu leaders who
organised the genocide in the Butare region, which includes Kibilizi.
The UN initially estimated that 5,000 children were born of rape in
the 1994 genocide, but the Survivors' Fund - a British charity working
in Rwanda - believes the number might be nearer 20,000.
Unlike genocide orphans, children of rape do not qualify for
government assistance and many live in poverty. Aid programmes have
tended to concentrate on the plight of the raped women, paying little
attention to the children, who have grown up feeling rejected by their
mothers and stigmatised by the wider community. In Rwanda, ethnicity
comes through the father's line, so Tutsi survivors call the children
Interahamwe and "son of a snake", while the relatives of the Hutu
rapists often tell the children that their mothers are wicked for
testifying against their fathers and putting them in jail.
Marie Josée Ukeye, a therapist who counsels 22 raped women and 12
children in Kibilizi, says the children have behavioural problems that
can only be overcome through years of group therapy. "The adolescent
girls are ashamed and often take on the suffering of their mothers,
while the boys have explosive fits of temper," she said. A genocide
survivor herself, she has been holding twice-weekly meetings with the
women and children for seven years, helping them express themselves
and overcome their anger and grief.
In Rwandan custom, a child is given a Christian and a Kinyarwanda
name. Epiphane Mukamakombe, who made several attempts to abort, called
her son Olivier
Utabazi, meaning "he belongs to them". She refused to breastfeed and
tried to kill him when he was a baby. Somehow he survived.
Now 19, Olivier says he understands why his mother was cruel to him,
but remains haunted by the father he cannot bring himself to hate.
"On the one hand I blame him because he raped my mother and did not
help her bring me up," he said. "But on the other hand, I do not know
if he was really a bad man."
As a child he was sullen and aggressive. In the last year his mother
has scraped together the money for him to study construction. He has
dreams of being an engineer and high hopes for a better life, but his
attitude to rape is confused. "Maybe they were going to kill my
mother, and then my father told her, 'if you let us have sex with you,
we won't kill you', so mum had to agree," he said. Rape, he says, is
wrong, but he seems more troubled by his own confused identity, saying
that he feels embarrassed and angry every time he has to fill in a
form where it asks the name of his father.
For his mother, the last 20 years have been a battle simply to accept
Olivier's existence - "I felt he was an Interahamwe," said Epiphane.
But over time she realised that, as her entire family had been killed
in the genocide, he was all she had. She still fears the relatives of
the men who raped her, accusing them of throwing stones at her house
and poisoning her cow. Olivier provides some kind of protection, even
though he is away at school much of the time. "The love came later,
when I realised God gave this child to me and he's the only family I
have," she said. "I cannot blame him for how he was born."
Once a week the women gather to work on each other's small plots of
land on the edge of the village. Bent double to gather beans for
drying, they laugh as they work, finding comfort in each other's
company and the knowledge that they are not alone. As desperately poor
subsistence farmers, few can afford to hire labour and, even if they
could, they say the labourers may be related to their imprisoned
rapists so they do not wish to interact with them. The stigma of rape
never goes away, and they say their Hutu neighbours still sometimes
call them whores.
Some women have been driven mad by their suffering and have passed the
trauma on to their children. Epiphanie Kanziga was gang-raped more
times than she can remember, and gave birth to a daughter, Adeline
Uwasi - the name means "her father's". The two live in a one-room
house. The mud floor floods in the rain and a battered old bus seat
with springs protruding through the plastic serves as a sofa. When
Adeline was three, Epiphanie left her in the forest, believing that
the genocide was continuing and she needed to be hidden. On another
occasion, she beat her around the head with a sharp stick, injuring
the child so badly she had to be taken to hospital. Fragile and
tearful, Epiphanie now relies on Adeline to look after her during the
annual season of commemoration, when Rwandans mark the 100 days of
genocide, starting on 7 April.
Smartly dressed in her royal blue school uniform, Adeline harbours
dreams of going to Europe or of getting a job in a bank, but she has
fallen behind in school and speaks in monosyllables so soft as to be
scarcely audible. Acutely aware of their status as outsiders, she once
told her mother it was just as well she had no more children as no one
from the community would have brought them gifts in the traditional
way when a baby is born. She finds it hard to trust men, seeing them
as liars. "I do not think they have love," she said, looking down at
her feet.
Last Thursday outside Kibilizi District Office, where 20 years ago
local Hutu leaders and Interahamwe gathered to plan genocide, the
villagers were preparing to rebury the bones of those who were
slaughtered. More than 3,000 were killed in the area, and every year
more bodies are found in mass graves and down latrines. Levine
Mukasakufu was in charge, wearing white rubber gloves as she lifted
mummified corpses into rough wooden coffins painted white, each
decorated with a cross. She pulled back a blue tarpaulin to reveal
dozens of bodies, frozen in position at the moment of death, one with
hands up as if begging for mercy. A man gently pulled out the remains
of a child who must have been about six, knees bent forwards as if she
or he had been sleeping.
One of the women broke down and started wailing, but Levine stayed
strong, determined that her family members should finally get a decent
burial. Unlike the other women, she has gone on to have five more
children. Josiane, whom she attacked for going to see her father, has
grown into a truculent and outwardly self-confident young woman, twice
the size of her mother. They have reached an accommodation, a way of
tolerating each other. The days of screaming and fighting are over.
"Sexual violence is a crime like no other," said Marie Josée. "It
touches all aspects of a person's life - mental, physical, social. It
destroys everything." However, she believes the children have a chance
of forging their own lives if they complete their education. "I have
seen what a great misfortune it is to be a child of rape," she said.
"But I have also seen that human beings, whatever they have lived
through, can make progress and get better."
Haunted by death and rape, condemned to poverty, the women have little
hope of happiness. Only the children have any chance of leaving the
past behind.
Lindsey Hilsum's film on Rwanda's children of rape will be broadcast
on Channel 4 News at 7pm on Tuesday.
http://www.google.ca/gwt/x?gl=CA&hl=en-CA&u=http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/08/rwanda-20-years-genocide-rape-children&source=s&q=Rwanda+20+years+on:+the+tragic+testimony+of+the+children+of+rape+The+Guardian
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